Coda

GQ put up more excerpts of Matt Latimer's book on the last days of the Bush Administration. Instead of merely being childish insults and tone deaf observations about his political enemies, this chunk takes a look at the performance of the Boy Wonder during the financial crisis and bailout phase of our economic meltdown. The picture it paints.....it...ugh...it really isn't pretty. It reads like the caricature of Bush we all had in our heads and liked to joke about. Trust me, read the whole thing to get the full horror, but otherwise these excerpts below really put that exclamation point on the failure pile in a sadness bowl that was the Bush Administration. It's a fitting coda.

“We can’t even defend our own proposal?” the president asked. “Why did we propose it, then?”
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“Then why the hell did I support it if I didn’t believe it would pass?” he snapped.
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Under his proposal, [Bush] said, the federal government would buy troubled mortgages on the cheap and then resell them at a higher price when the market for them stabilized.

“We’re buying low and selling high,” he kept saying.

The problem was that his proposal didn’t work like that. One of the president’s staff members anxiously pulled a few of us aside. “The president is misunderstanding this proposal,” he warned. “He has the wrong idea in his head.”
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When it was explained to him that his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration.

“Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he asked.

I feel like that singing and dancing Warner Brothers frog should jump out from behind the article, wearing a top hat and tails, and singing "And he was the President for eight yeaaaaarrrrrsssss!" before launching back into "Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey" as a curtain drops. Wonderful questions, George. I get the feeling that you were asking ones like that quite a bit during those two terms. It shows, it really shows.